Beyond the Scream Tunnel

After coaching high school teams and Olympians, Coach John Babington finds collegiate-level success at Wellesley

The connection between Wellesley College and distance running goes back a long way. The college is located just before the halfway point on the Boston Marathon course and each Patriot’s Day a significant percentage of the college’s 2,400 students line the campus side of Route 135 to cheer on marathon participants, hour after hour. Affectionately known as the Wellesley Scream Tunnel, the raucous display of unabashed youthful enthusiasm is a highlight of the event.

Quite a few Wellesley students are themselves runners, and some are among the best in the Division III ranks. Their coach, John Babington, is also one of the best, anywhere.

Cross country was initiated as a varsity sport at Wellesley in 1985, track and field in 2010–11 after a decade of “club sport” status. But despite the relatively brief history, a tradition of running success is well-established on the picturesque campus. No small part of the credit goes to Babington, a veteran coach who himself ran through the Scream Tunnel 13 straight years during an earlier phase of his lengthy involvement in the sport. Though still serious about his own running, Babington is much more concerned with the athletes he coaches.

Coach in the Making

Babington ran cross country and track at Williams College and brought his half-mile time down to 1:56 before graduating in 1967. He continued competing while a Harvard law student, completed his first Boston Marathon in 1968, and still runs in Boston-area road races to this day. “Once I started running I always loved it,” Babington says, “not just as a recreational activity and not just for the pure joy of the running process, but as a competitive sport.”

It was while taking a year off from law school to teach math at a prep school in western Massachusetts that Babington first tried coaching. Given his own athletic background, Babington was sized up as a good choice to mentor the junior varsity cross country and indoor track programs. This discovery eventually led him to volunteer as the coach of the Liberty Athletic Club based in Cambridge, Mass., then a powerhouse of elite youth, high school and post-collegiate runners.

In the spring of 1975 Babington came across a young runner who would go on to become one of the very finest in the world. It was Lynn Jennings, who under Babington’s tutelage ran on three U.S. Olympic teams (picking up a bronze medal at 10,000m in 1992) and won three IAAF World Cross Country Championships (1990–1992). Babington and Jennings worked together successfully until Jennings decided to run the Boston Marathon as a high school senior, an idea Babington opposed, and they parted ways for a decade. But when they reunited in the late 1980s the partnership proved almost unbeatable.

Liberty Athletic Club was a cut above other women’s clubs during the late 1970s and early 1980s, winning numerous junior and senior women’s national championships in cross country and indoor and outdoor track. Future Olympians Joan Benoit and Judi St. Hilaire were among the many elites Babington worked with during this period. By the mid-1980s the club began to lose its ability to attract national-class talent to shoe company endorsements, as well as the growth of opportunities for young women to compete in high school and college programs. But its role had been key to these achievements and today Liberty A.C. carries on as a club for post-collegiate and masters athletes.

While he continued working with athletes at Liberty A. C. until 1993, Babington also coached for three years in the mid-1980s as an assistant in the women’s cross country and track and field programs at Harvard. A move to combine the Harvard men’s and women’s programs led to the elimination of Babington’s position, but he was determined to continue coaching at the collegiate level.

“I knew Wellesley had a great reputation as a top-notch academic school with a beautiful campus and nice surroundings for running purposes, so it was quite interesting to me,” Babington says “Of course it was a part-time job at that time , but I was really pleased to land the position.”